By Gordon Berry

A COUNCILLOR has expressed concern about the Scottish Government leaving Fife Council “in limbo” due to its delay in ruling on Fife’s controversial new finalised draft structure plan.

The comment came from the north-east Fife area committee chairman, Liberal Democrat Andrew Arbuckle.

He renewed calls for an “examination in public”—effectively a public inquiry—into a document that has attracted more than 2000 objections from individuals, campaign groups and community councils, and opposition from neighbouring local authorities on both sides of the Forth.

Mr Arbuckle said at the weekend almost six months have passed since the council submitted its structure plan revision to the government.

“Now councillors are wondering just how much longer the Scottish Government will take to come to an opinion on the submission, and a number of us feel that the matter is not being dealt with quickly enough.

“Fife Council was set a tight deadline of the end of December 2007 to submit the plan for approval by the government but almost half a year has slipped by without any indication of the government’s attitude to it.

“Because we are in this limbo position of not knowing how the government view the submission, the St Andrews and east Fife area local plan cannot be progressed.

“As a further knock-on effect, and because our local plans are well out of date, this is making our planning processes more difficult.

“At the last area committee meeting in north-east Fife we had a large number of applications that were outwith the development areas of the old plans.

“If we had our new local plan in place, then these would either be inside development areas or they would be outside.

“Decisions would be much more straightforward than they currently are with the committee having to make judgement calls on all these applications.

“In view of the massive number of objections to the structure plan, I personally hope that the government decide to go to an examination in public to resolve the many concerns.

“And while we are supposedly well through the local plan procedure, so many changes have been made to the basis for the document that it must be radically changed to accommodate these changes.

“Efforts have to be made to deal with the many areas of concern.”

Yesterday the government did not comment beyond saying the plan is with ministers for consideration.